Aesthete, billboard model, and megalomaniac VINCENT GALLO (born 1961) famously put a hex on Roger Ebert’s colon. He makes society-page appearances with the Bush twins and sells Vincent Gallo tube tops on his website for $300. He is a contrarian’s contrarian, an asshole of heroic stature. He may be the best put-on artist since Andy Kaufman — or anyhow, such is the vain hope of many of us who love him helplessly. “It’s best for me to remain small-minded on an emotional level and broad-minded on a conceptual level,” he says, and yes, he wears his pettiness and narcissism on his sleeve. His profile watermarks nearly every frame of the gorgeous Super 16mm landscape in The Brown Bunny (2003), for instance, and he designed the film’s advertising campaign around the goal of humiliating ex-girlfriend Chloe Sevigny. “All of this doesn’t matter as long as the work I do to achieve these small-minded needs is a lot more interesting than me and my reasons for making it.” Buffalo 66 (1998), itself a monument to lovingly nursed grudges, is enough to justify him indefinitely with its heartbreaking self-exposure and lunar beauty.

I met Vincent. He was actually VERY sweet-charming, a little shy and not the way he portrays himself to be. I think he gets a kick out of pissing off the public and taking advantage of his fame. All in all, he is a genius worth meeting and talking to.

About the Author

Mimi Lipson’s story collection, The Cloud of Unknowing (Yeti, 2014), was named after her favorite Christian mystical tract. Her chapbook, Food & Beverage, is available here. She lives up and down the eastern seaboard.